I don’t write to be famous, I don’t write to be known, I write because I am and I want to be read. How sad to fill a room with paintings no one sees or play music no one hears. Writing is talking without sound, singing without score and dancing without movement and yet, it is all of them. It is a solitary art conjured from thought and expressed by the need to communicate.

HEAD SLAPS, SPEED BUMPS and LIGHTBULBS, one woman's WTF, oops and ah-ha moments of life.

They were published once, and as every writer knows, once is not enough.

Monday, May 30, 2016

While cleaning and culling through ourshit stuff
I am coming across old writing, lots and lots of old writing. I’m not reading
much of it, if I did I’d never get anything done. I’m shifting the pile of file
boxes from way back in the corner, when we moved here twelve years ago, closer
to the attic door. One box was a little different.

Flipping open the lid my all too familiar
cursive caught my eye.

I’m a keyboard kind of girl, long
hand feels cumbersome and difficult to edit, so to see a bunch of legal pads
filled with writing kind of surprised me. What
the fuck heck is this, I thought.

I started to read.

Not bad.

Not bad at all.

Did I really write this?

I do not remember writing one
word.

My mother’s handwriting and mine are
were almost identical and she wrote long hand. Maybe this was hers. Nope. It
was mine, she spelled better. This was laden with misspellings. That’s why I
keyboard my stories, the trapped fifth grade teacher in my computer tells me when I fuck up spell a word wrong.

Before I got totally lost in the world of new
characters I decided to put the legal pad masterpiece back in the box and move on.

But wait.

There’s more.

Maybe it’s my long lost
bestseller with a backstory of its own to rival any treasure hunt.

I read another page.

Maybe putting it back in the box
is my way of fearing success.

I read another page.

Maybe.

But I do not recall the story or
the effort.

I closed the lid and taped it shut.

Once we move, and once I sort
through the boxes again, looking for something I cannot find, I’ll come across
the legal pad masterpiece, brew a cup of tea, sit and read and realize the truth
regarding my fiction and where it belongs.

Will I laugh or cry or will my
cheeks pink with the self-embarrassment of stupidity. Will I edit or shred?

Monday, May 2, 2016

1. I have 2Ns on the tale end of my first name. Does that make me different or does it simply provide me with an extra letter when I need one?
2. I am pivoting among projects, dizzying myself, confusing my goal and lost in a sea of choices.
3. Pick one and focus.
4. Always a multi-reader, (two books at a time), I can't write like that.

This weekend we had some long-time friends over for dinner. The last time I saw them, (six months ago), I mentioned that someone in traditional publishing showed real interest in a project I thought was, "the one". They asked if I had finished, "that book".

When I told that I had set aside that project for something I had finished years earlier, real disappointment passed across their faces. One half of the couple had worked in traditional publishing for years, so she knew the importance of the bone thrown my way by the earlier "someone".
That I saw, (you stupid fuck), on there faces, and (what the fuck are doing), lift the corners of their mouths and (finish the fucker or you will hate yourself), seep from their gaze, surprised me.

What am I doing?
Why am I spinning?
Why am I writing this, right now, instead of working on "the one"?

What?
Why?
I am off to slough away the depression of unfinished dreams and re-inspire myself. I am again telling myself, I WILL FTF. I have a feeling that this time, resolve will stick, because the story is a good one and I have an extra letter if I need one.

Times Two

My column 'Enough Said' is in 8 ‘Times’ newspapers, a division of The Day in New London, Connecticut. I weekly pitch myself as the writing love-child of Andy Rooney and Erma Bombeck. Not as acerbic as Andy and a bit more modern than Erma, I admire them as winking-paragons of realistic observation. Enoughsaidcolumn.blogspot.com is my tilt on things. Carolynnwith2Ns is my tilt on everything else. Email me at Cpianta@comcast.net
or CP.enoughsaid@aol.com